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SA startup leads fire fight

Patrick EmmettUpdated
Mon 3 May 2010, 10:22 AM AEST

Stateline SA meets a local father and son team who run a leading first response aerial bushfire fighting company.

Transcript

IAN HENSCHKE, PRESENTER: Well, behind me you can see the Mount Lofty ranges and today marks the end of the official fire ban season up there. So it's time for a group of pilots to sit back and relax a bit after a very busy season fighting fires across the state.

Patrick Emmett reports on the local company that's helping create a better way of fighting fires

PATRICK EMMETT, REPORTER: If you think this doesn't look like the most comfortable day job, you would be right.

Flying a small plane carrying 3 tonnes of water into the middle of a bushfire means you have to deal with extreme heat and extreme turbulence.

When fires like this are raging Sam McCabe is one of the pilots in the middle of the smoky chaos

SAM MCCABE, AEROTECH FIRST RESPONSE: You would have thought it was the middle of the night it was that dark, that black and that rough. So that was quite horrific actually.

I hit turbulence that hard that it smashed it against the roof. It takes a lot to pop them. (Laughs)

And then I got wet and I couldn't work out whether it was blood or water.

PATRICK EMMETT: The key Sam McCabe says to surviving those situations is that flying has to be in your blood.

SAM MCCABE: Your flying almost needs to be second nature and you need to be concentrating on everything else that's going on outside.

PATRICK EMMETT: But it was a lot more relaxed when Stateline caught up with Sam McCabe and his father Bob in the Adelaide hills.

With the fire season coming to an end, it's a chance to make planes ready for next summer. They run Aerotech First Response, a small family company that has helped revolutionise the way we fight fires.

Bob McCabe's time in the pilot seat started on horseback.

Forty years ago, he was a jackaroo in the South-east. He saw an opportunity to take over a struggling local aerial spraying business with just one plane and as it grew, he began working with the CFS (Country Fire Service) fighting fires.

BOB MCCABE, AEROTECH FIRST RESPONSE: We would go to fires and they would be hundreds of hectares in size by the time we arrived.

And of course you've got an enormous perimeter and you just don't know where to start, I guess.

And you see houses being threatened and lives and people, and it becomes yeah - quite frustrating.

PATRICK EMMETT: So over the years the CFS and the company put in place an initial attack strategy they say is world-class.

Put simply, its aim is to kill a fire before it grows. At the first sign of smoke a pilot is scrambled.

SAM MCCABE: We'll get a page and we'll have the aircraft airborne within three minutes.

PATRICK EMMETT: While they may look about the size of your average Cessna, the $1.5 million air tractors are far more powerful. Their engines have four times the horsepower and they can turn on a coin.

Once they've dropped their 3,000 litres of water and foam, they can be reloaded in a few minutes. To speed up the turnaround time, they can have access to around 200 airfields across the state.

PATRICK EMMETT: Of course crews still have to do the hard work on the ground to control the fires but the CFS says the aggressive use of planes is reducing their work.

DAVID CANT, CFS: I think it's been a big success story. We've proven in a number of fires this year, getting the aircraft out early on extreme fire danger days - even the catastrophic days - we've been able to keep the fires very small by getting the aircraft out as soon as possible.

PATRICK EMMETT: But when it comes to dousing fires, some argue big is better and push for the use of the giant air crane helicopters. South Australia already uses one in summer and both the CFS and the company say it plays an important part.

But Bob McCabe believes they're not the complete answer. Given the vast areas of the state, he says the planes are much more cost effective.

BOB MCCABE: One Ericsson helicopter in money terms could be replaced by something like 30 of these aircraft.

PATRICK EMMETT: The company now uses eight planes around the state.

As for the future, the CFS thinks the main focus is now on improving communications about what fires are doing to help the pilots and the locals on the ground.

DAVID CANT: From the Black Saturday fires, intelligence and information is everything to everybody these days and what we need to do is develop that capacity so we can better inform the community.

PATRICK EMMETT: And it says it's important home owners take responsibility for protecting their homes which Bob McCabe says is the best thing about doing his job.

BOB MCCABE: You get a lot of satisfaction and gratitude from maybe saving some lives and some property and whatever. It adds a huge bonus to it all.